Sociology and Demography

Sociology

Sociology is the study of human social relationships and institutions. Sociology’s subject matter is diverse, ranging from crime to religion, from the family to the state, from the divisions of race and social class to the shared beliefs of a common culture, and from social stability to radical change in whole societies. Unifying the study of these diverse subjects of study is sociology’s purpose of understanding how human action and consciousness both shape and are shaped by surrounding cultural and social structures.

The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely, the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000s have seen the rise of new analytically, mathematically and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.

Sociologists emphasize the careful gathering and analysis of evidence about social life to develop and enrich our understanding of key social processes. The research methods sociologists use are varied. Sociologists observe the everyday life of groups, conduct large-scale surveys, interpret historical documents, analyze census data, study video-taped interactions, interview participants of groups, and conduct laboratory experiments. The research methods and theories of sociology yield powerful insights into the social processes shaping human lives and social problems and prospects in the contemporary world. 

According to Durkheim, the three branches of sociology include:

• Social morphology - refers to the geographical setting and population density of specific areas and how those aspects affect social society.
• Social physiology - refers to the religion, morals, law, economic and political aspects of society and they way in which each discipline affects human society as a whole.
• General sociology - referred to by Durkheim as the philosophical part of sociology as it works to discover social laws that come from specialized social associations.

Demography

"demos" - the people

Demography is the study of statistics such as births, deaths, income, or the incidence of disease, which illustrate the changing structure of human populations. It is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings.

Demographic analysis can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as education, nationality, religion, and ethnicity. Educational institutions usually treat demography as a field of sociology, though there are a number of independent demography departments.

Formal demography limits its object of study to the measurement of population processes, while the broader field of social demography or population studies also analyses the relationships between economic, social, cultural, and biological processes influencing a population.